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It arrived in the post today, so er yeah sweet. I'm actually quite impressed by the level of detail and mechanics they put in from GTA4. Whilst it's not an exact replica, there were loads of places I instantly recognised from my time as Niko Bellic. In fact loads of mundane things such as hotwiring a car by mashing the L + R triggers is now simply jiggling a screwdriver around in the ignition slot. GTA's rendition of drug wars is quite awesome. The GPS also works quite well, that said though, it does seem to love giving you a longer route than you need. Oh and did I mention moving camera. This makes it infinitesimally better than the other top down gtas when driving.

It's a shame you can't do everything from GTA 4 though. No more underground trains or going into burger shots (you can only buy hotdogs now). No more calling your "friends" in the middle of the night for lols. One thing that's a real shame though is the lack of wifi multiplayer. Rockstar didn't exactly make it clear - they kinda interpreted local play as "wifi adhoc multiplayer". Maybe someone'll create tunneling software for this.

But still, it feels right on a handheld, especially with the save anywhere function. Hopefully other companies will start focusing on the DS's strengths instead of pumping out "Imagine Party Babiez" every so often.

Wow, GAME actually sent me a game early rather than having it bang on release date. I'm quite surprised, more than Zavvi coming back from the dead to bombard me with Ã‚Â£5 off-major-upcoming-new-games which save you more than GAME's shitty reward points...

They also sent me a little figurine. Unfortunately it looked like a 5 year old did the paint job.

*ahem*

Well if you played the demo, you pretty much know what to expect. Control wise the game functions pretty much the same as Resident Evil 4, except now it has strafe. Yeah. Often-times in Resident Evil 4 I was forced to run from a corner, turn, aim, line up a shot and fire. Now I just have to move from the corner, aim and fire. They still included the option to not strafe, although I have no idea why the hell anybody would want to do that.

Speaking of which, it can get really annoying when not being able to move whilst aiming, this makes clearing projectile wielding enemies really tedious. I appreciate not being able to move when firing, or even whilst aiming heavy weapons, but using a freaking knife (let alone pistol or reloading) causes you to be immobile? That just puts you at one hell of a disadvantage. Granted this is the same as in Resident Evil 4, but unfortunately in Resident Evil 5 you've got Sheva to take care of, and having to draw and undraw your knife to save her when she's being felt up grabbed by enemies is quite annoying, let alone engage in knife fights with the enemy beyond standing next to a choke point. But thank goodness the enemies are still piss poor with using weapons and moving slowly (while near you).

...And speaking of AI, whilst it is a lot more capable than most other co-op AI out there, it has one major flaw - it's not invulnerable. This means that any stupid decisions get you a game over in seconds (on harder difficulties). She's essentially Ashley with a gun (and that enemies want to kill her instead of abducting her, thank goodness you can turn friendly fire off). She's also unwilling to use her knife unless she's out of ammo. This includes wasting valuable shotgun rounds at common enemies. I usually only give her one spare mag, and she still squanders it. She also thinks that running atDr. Salvador with a knife is a marvellous idea once she's wasted her rifle rounds.Guess I'll need to find another human player ASAP and not some random run and gun twelve year old who thinks shooting heads is cool in later Resident Evils this is potentially lethal at night.

And onto the issue of racism. I'm actually quite surprised at how quickly my little sister noticed what was going on in the game:

"Why are you playing as a white guy and killing all the black people?"

I told her it was set in Africa, and she understood. Then she later on noticed that there were various zombies of different ethnicities, and asked why if it was set in the middle of Africa, and I had to tell her about the controversy around RE5 and why they were put in. It could be worse, in Far Cry 2 one part of the plot was all foreigners getting rounded up, when clearly there were non-African people still roaming around trying to kill you, which contradicted the story. However Capcom does seem to take this with a little humour, early on in the game they knock down that blatant missing hot white blonde haired woman syndrome, and force you to finish it off - with a bang .

But anyway it's still a decent game with some good production values. Anyone who's up for co-op gimme a PM.

More like Marcus and Dom's Bogus Journey. *ahem* Zavvi actually got this to me a day earlier than even Game, wow, it's certainly a lot better than when Branson ran the place where Metroid Prime was delivered to me 5 days late. I was otherwise planning to burn things in Far Cry 2 today, but hey, shiny new game.

I guess CliffordB was right about it being more badass. There's a s***load of "badass" dialogue this time around, and the writing does attempt to sound more interesting than the first, I'm not quite feeling it yet, but, well I'll see where it goes. The presentation however is a lot more cinematic, taking a page out of COD4's book. The music is definitely a lot better than the first Gears of War, I didn't particularly like the repetitiveness of the soundtrack in the first, and the weapon sounds and particle effects have been a little "beefed up".One thing that I really hated was that the game still used "kamikaze" enemies, which while a nuiscance in Gears of War 1, was just plainly pissing off now that the engine can handle loads of them, not that they were difficult, it's just that fighting them in a dark tunnel, and wasting loads of ammo, only to come up to a boss at the end of it and hearing your gun "click" just wasn't badass. And also the mortar is just plain confusing to use.I haven't tried multiplayer yet, but I hope that Epic adding its awesome bots should make multiplayer a lot more fun than the first one (where everyone on my team ends up quitting after a couple of rounds).I should be able to finish this quickly, hardcore isn't too difficult, and choosing a separate difficulty for co-op is a definite plus, particularly when gunning for achievements when a mate is over.

I guess I can't really complain much in franchise terms - the only connections are the name and the fact that there are a shitload of mercs everywhere (and perhaps that Ubi is hoping to hit back against Crytek).

I was expecting to go into a completely open world - I kinda hated the fact that there were rocky outcrops everywhere restricting your movements in the terrain, they should at least let you climb over them, perhaps they were trying to force you to the checkpoints conveniently placed at each crossroad/junction/bridge; speaking of which...Why the hell does everyone want to kill you? It doesn't really make much sense, you're supposed to be a nobody at first, and there are loads of foreign mercenaries everywhere - WHAT MAKES YOU SO SPECIAL?!? It kinda defeats the purpose of the whole plot - do they (both sides in the conflict) shoot at everyone on sight (which is surprisingly large) without checking their ID first? It's so annoying that I have to switch to "easy" just to get to my objective without wasting my ammo in a random skirmish. Plus no wonder Ubisoft refuse to have a "buddy" drive for you, the AI's so bloody shite at driving that it's actually quite funny to watch them ruthlessly pursue you without any regard for their own welfare, only to get stuck on a random tree for you to cut them down. I mean they are sometimes quite good at pinning your vehicle in place, but they don't take any advantage of that (prefering to wait until you get out of your car, before they get out of theirs). [/rant]

But regardless, the AI is quite competant when on foot, and there's all sorts of nice little effects such as destructable cover, distant gunshots as well as animals and weapon jamming. The only things that are IMO missing are body awareness (wears mah legz?) and the way reloads are performed (bearing in mind any rounds that are already chambered).

Oh, and I chose the Irish guy. I guess it's a shame in the sense that you don't get to hear him speak (well at least they learnt that Jack Carver was a total arsehat), but the whole silent protagonist thing doesn't really work as well as in other games like Half Life.

At long last Nintendo of Europe has decided to get off its lazy arse and give us Brawl. Sure it smells of their incompetence, considering how nearly EVERY other publisher in the world can now release titles worldwide within a week of each other, but still...

Game charged me 3 more quid than usual for a grand total of Ã‚Â£38 ($76), I don't know whether or not it's inflation, or that it's supposed to be the limited edition. Yeah heh, my arse, all it is is a cardboard sleeve and a postcard of Zelda, and her moves that we already know. Uh, Nintendo? That's not how you do limited editions. Not only are you shitting on us, but you're also telling us to pay more for it.

So I guess I could import. But Nintendo would just work its way around it, and no one would buy it when it does finally come out, which would prompt Nintendo of Europe to concentrate less on getting quality games over, and more on shovelware. It's a vicious cycle see.

So yeah, Brawl itself is presented all very nicely, and the fmvs show what the game would have looked like on more powerful hardware (depth of field + HDR lighting ftw). It's also nice to know that Nintendo is considering third party engines, as evidenced by the Havok Physics on the box. Hooray for a proper single player mode as well, but I am saying wtf to the story a lot (although it really doesn't help that I had half a pint during lunch). The game has changed significantly. Older characters seem a lot more slower than before, except for Fox, it was quite surprising at how much speed he kept that I ran straight off the edge (wonder what it'll be like when I get Sonic ). It also seems a LOT easier to spam attacks, rather than relying on skill, evidence of this is with some character's attacks such as Squirtle's whose "up B" has quite a range, and is indefinitely useful on enemies trying to recover. Speaking of spammable, this seems very easy to do with the new characters - MetaKnight was a lot easier to use than Marth. And I hate the jumping sections. There's too many of 'em! I lose more lives to those than anything else. They're so fucking annoying.

So I'm revising for my final Mechanics (M3) test in June, and seeing that I'm bored and intrigued by a couple of questions on the recoil of firearms, I decided to apply them to REAL LIFE (yes, I know, I must be seriously sad/depressed/got nothing-else-better-to-do etc), and work out the recoil of commonly used firearms (in both video games and real life). Note all units are in metric, it's not possible to work it out in imperial.

So as you can see here there are loads of errors in current video games. The Uzi has the lowest recoil. The M4 carbine has a higher recoil rate than the M16. The MP5 doesn't have that high a recoil in comparison to other weapons. The only weapon portrayed spot on is the desert eagle. Well it might be different in practice, but this is what the theory says.

55 pound is unbelievable, even worse is that I bought CoD4 for the 360 and sold my pc copy at the same time, I had to shell out 10 pounds more for the 360, and I was lucky. Its very hard to find even a pre-owned copy for below 30 quid. Thank god for ebay.

No mods

burnieFIRST Member Star(s)Indication of membership status - One star is a FIRST member, two stars is Double Gold

Yeah there's too many useless crap functions like the fake google groups thingy. I sometimes wish they have a draft function for journals. One thing they could improve upon is the messagges system tho. goddamit im typing from an eeepc right now and im so unused to this tiny keyboard...

Well, you see, I have IE, Firefox, and Opera. I use IE for basic things like checking alerts and e-mails because that's what Windows Live Messenger will open by default. I like to let Messenger sign in automatically and let it say "You have this many new e-mail messages in your inbox," to which I say "Orly, Windows Live Messenger? May I see these new e-mail messages in my inbox?" He then says "Yes, you may, but I'll only show you in Internet Explorer." My rebuttal is usually "You, sir, are a douche!"

Oh its absolutely freezing at the moment, well into the minus numbers at night, and not much better in the day. Frost and snow is what we're getting at the moment. Its all good though, the heating is totally fixed now.

Well it's that time of night where I go through who's online, click on pics that appeal to me in all sorts of ways and then post a random comment on their page like "taco's aren't just yummy, they give you super powers".(well the truth is I copy and paste this exact message into all the random peoples page, but hey, thats time managment for you.So what now?, do you reply?, mod point this?, block me from communication? etc etc...The fact is it's just a random thing I often do, there is no need for a response from yourself unless you want to. I don't have any cash prizes to give, holidays on offer, free cars or even taco's to hand out. It is just plain randomness that compel's me to do it (and a lack of the right med's).For those of you that have been unfortunate in the past to recieve something like this from me, my heart goes out to you for the suffering It may have caused, but please understand that I don't keep a checklist of my unfortunate victims.Well thats all from me, I leave you alone now to ponder this....If we didn't call green,,,, green, what colour would grass be? (I spelt it COLOUR because thats how it's done DownUnder)

Yeah, I know, right? I mean, one of the guys that is like the captain of the flame gang is actually pretty interesting to talk about, even if he's the one that all the nekos/"pedos"/weirdos try to get banned.

It depends on the University I think, they're all different. At Glasgow, you take enough subjects to make up 240 credits, and then when you get to 3rd year, those subjects lead to the degree you choose that year. If yo fail just one, you can re-do it, but you wont get funded for it, it'll come out of your own pocket. If you take more than one, then you will get funding.

yeah but thats britain. ok lately there has been something less brutal than what happend with the sean bell thing where he got shot 50 times, but something like that: This guy was in his apartment when the police came to his house, and idk why they tazered him when he was on his balcony, the guy fell over the railing and died. The only thing they did was make the cop publicly apologize and then put him on desk work. nothing more.

its virtually impossible to get compensation from the NYPD. this black guy was shot last year, during his wedding. He was exiting the church, and then cops started firing at him because they had "evidence" that he had a gun on him and was planning to kill somebody. But that's not the point: they fired 3 clips (each from 3 cops) into him, and they still didn't get in trouble!

EmessaiFIRST Member Star(s)Indication of membership status - One star is a FIRST member, two stars is Double Gold

11 years ago

I seriously doubt that. Their game was 1200 due to extensive amounts of content. Braid was 1200 because that guy basically worked on it by himself, and he needed money. xD We'll probably see more 1200 games, but I'm pretty sure 800 will remain norm.

Did you call it the shark because it was blue? I originally wasn't going to color it, but i thought it would look better if i did. Blue was the best color, because it's not the generic luftwaffe/american air force grey, and brown would not show some of the details. The film (which i labeled 11) was so sexy when it was blue, and it was hard to find a matching color. Since there were almost no blue fractal camo available online, i had to create one myself. This was done by changing the hue of the american grey army uniform (urban ASOC or something in that sense if I'm not mistaken) into the blue green spectre. I then used another two layers of different camo types each one progressivly darker and with less opacity for each one, and one last and darkest layer i used a special glossy metal/ glass texture i made, making ripples visible on the left wing. Since this was originally a drawing, i scanned and it took me forever to make it symmetrical, i actually used a ruler taped to the monitor at one point! During this i somewhat learned to use the pen tool- something that i haven't used before, and that made my life a whole lot easier when i did a contour outline of the entire thing. I have absolutely no idea why i typed this thing so long. I guess I'm proud of it or something. Feel free to give any pointers, i would be glad if you did. P.S. Did you think episode 12 of RvB was rather weak? I was expecting more, instead they just stretched out the church-wash conversation into most of the clip.